A friend of mine got himself a GoPro Hero3+ black edition camera. “Nice!” I thought, owning a Hero3 (without the +) black edition myself. But there was one major problem with the device: That sucker just won’t always turn on! The official support webpage states that in this case you should take out the battery and put it back in, and that up to TEN TIMES! How the f**k can you screw up a product that badly?

In fact, my buddy found that the whole thing is just purely random. Reinsert the battery and you get a 50% chance that the device can be turned on. If you try to turn it on while it’s charging, chances are it will crash so badly that it doesn’t even notice if the charging cable is unplugged and the charging LED just happily keeps giving light. Nice. Fail.

Just imagine you’re swimming and have the GoPro in the nice water tight case and have to TAKE IT OUT to be able to turn it on! Yeah. Nope.

The best thing about the whole story is, the replacement camera he got has exactly the same problem, with additional physical flaws. The support claims that the problem can’t be in the camera. Haha, sure.

For the whole story listen to the poor victim of bad support demonstrating the fail in the video we made together. Sorry it’s german, but there are english subs! Oh and we made this video mainly because the GoPro support wanted a video showing the malfunction. There you have it haha! Remember to share it to show the GoPro team just how hard this shot went into their own leg.

Don’t get me wrong. The GoPro cameras are nice little devices and the image quality is quite nice for such a small thing – if it works. If it was bad luck, the support could still have handled the case much better, maybe with just a little less ignorance and incompetence.